Brief Chat: Kara Goucher at Her Best

Kara Goucher, third in the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials on January 14 in Houston in 2:26:06, will run the London Olympic marathon on August 5. Goucher was fifth in the 2011 Boston Marathon

with a personal best of 2:24:52. She had third-place marathon finishes in New York City in 2008 (2:25:53) and Boston in 2009 (2:32:25). She was the 2007 World Championships 10,000-meter bronze medalist. In the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Goucher was tenth in the 10,000 and ninth in the 5000.Goucher is coached by Jerry Schumacher and her chief training partner is fellow Olympic marathoner Shalane Flanagan. Goucher is married to fellow University of Colorado alumnus and 2000 Olympian Adam Goucher; they are the parents of a son, Colt. She has already committed to running the 2013 Boston Marathon.When we last spoke, things were getting better and better for you and you could do about half the workouts with Shalane and lead a few of them. Are you an appreciably better runner than you were a month ago?KG: Yeah. Things have been really great, and I have to laugh when I think back to the fall. I do every single thing that Shalane does; we do everything together now. We've had a couple of days where she broke me and a couple of days where I broke her, but in general, we've done 99 percent of every step together. Whereas in the fall, I really couldn't say that; I thought it was a very successful day if I could last half of her workout. I feel like a completely different person than I was in January, but that's okay. It's actually taken a lot of the pressure off of me.A different person in a very positive way, I would think.KG: Yeah, I feel very good at where I'm at. I know that I'm ready to PR, and I feel excited about it. Training's been a lot of fun. It's been very hard, but it's fun to be able to run with someone and to help each other push other rather than just to hang on as long as possible and then blow up. It's helped me mentally to prepare more and get more excited about what I'm capable of doing.At the USA Half Marathon, in your former hometown of Duluth, you expected to do quite well without being really tested that much, right? It wasn't really 100 percent effort, was it? [Goucher won on June 16 in 1:09:45.]KG: No. I ran 110 miles that week. Jerry and I said that I need at the 9-mile mark to make a move and then again at the 11-mile mark. That was really the execution, to have a significant change of pace at 9 miles and then another at 11 miles.And the change at 11 was to be sustained all the way to the finish?KG: Yeah. So I think I ran exactly 10:30 from nine to 11, so I picked it up to 5:15 [per mile]. And then I picked it up to 5:08 for the next two miles. It wasn't a kick or anything like that, it was more like being tired, having that fatigue built up, and then running a pace that's realistic that you can still hold.This has been an emotional year for you, coming back from a hip injury and going to a group in which you initially felt very far behind. At the Marathon Trials, you were in what you said you knew was likely to be a four-woman race, which meant one person was going to be left out. And you had a couple of miles in which you weren't feeling all that great. I'm sure you were being somewhat emotionally wrung out, and by the time the race was over, you must have been emotionally spent by the uncertainty that went into a four-person race like that.KG: Honestly, the entire fall was just an anxious time for me. I didn't sleep very well during that time. I knew I made the right decision in joining the new group, but I just was worried that it was going to be down to the wire. I really did a good job that day of putting everything aside and just trying to be smart and being really analytical during the race. And towards the end there, basically I felt like I was calling Amy's [Hastings'] bluff, that she was hurting more than she was looking like she was.It wasn't until the last mile that I started to get emotional and get ahead of myself there. But after that race, I was so exhausted, I literally could have just laid down at the finish and fallen asleep. It took me a couple of weeks to just sort through that. It wasn't just a physical tired; my body actually recovered from the race quite well. It was just so many months of uncertainty, and my decision to leave Alberto [Salazar, her previous coach] had been building for a long time. So it was just so much that I had been carrying around for a long time. I finally felt, after that race, that I could finally move forward. But I was just exhausted. We went to Minnesota and Colorado and that was really good because I could be out of the running world a little bit.People understand that the top distance runners are physically gifted and put in a lot of miles. But obviously, to get to where you are requires real psychological and emotional strength.KG: I've had this conversation with Mary Wittenberg [the New York Road Runners President and CEO] before and she has talked to people at work and said, "You need to feel like you're risking all the time, and it needs to be scary all the time," and that's what it's like to be a runner. Every time you put yourself out there and people are watching and paying attention, it's so easy to just say, "Oh, they ran that or this" or "they're idiots" or "they train stupid." But you're putting so much into it and you're so vulnerable every time you go out there and you're risking so much, day in and day out.That's been a change in me from high school until now. Of course, I was always competitive and wanted it. But I used to be afraid to say my goals out loud, and I didn't want a lot of attention. And as I've grown, I've gotten over the negative people and the negative comments. I risk so much to do this, and it's awesome and I love it and I wouldn't have it any other way. But when people are at work and they're nervous about a presentation, that's how I feel all the time. I'm going to practice and I need it to go well and I'm so invested in it, emotionally and physically.Are the harder workouts not just like building blocks towards the ends you seek but daunting tasks in and of themselves?KG: Oh yeah. I definitely have my days when I'm nervous for the workout. On Monday, we had a 21-mile run with 10 miles in the middle of breaking our rhythm, doing down to 5:10 pace and then slowing down to 6:00 pace after having run 7 miles at a good clip before that. You want it to go well because that's what you're basing your race strategy off of. I would say once if not twice a week I get really nervous.This is the longest training block I've ever set aside for a marathon, and it's gone consistently really, really well—just like a couple of bad workouts here and there and a couple of crazy good ones that are kind of like outliers. I can look back and to ask myself to run a PR doesn't seem scary because I've proven to myself now consistently that I'm ready to do that.We can pretty much guess that whatever else happens in the Olympic marathon, Mary Keitany is going to go off really hard.KG: It seems like a sure thing.You have your own race to run, but you desire a medal. How do you respond if she goes out extremely fast and maybe a couple of people try to stay with her? Do you still have to hang back and hope for the best in the second half of the race?KG: A little bit. There's a realistic time that I know I'm ready to run and you can a few miles under that [pace] but if I get three or four miles in and I'm still running 5:20 or faster, then it's time for me to think, "Is this realistic for me to hold this for a while?" So there's a little bit of a roll of the dice that you have to take to stay in contention, but then what's the reality that all of these people are going to be able to maintain this pace, myself included? At that point, I've have to make the decision; is this the time to back off a little bit?Shalane's a little bit more gutsy in that sense than I am. We've learned that we're very different racers, and she's willing to risk a little bit more and have a longer drive to the finish, where I want to preserve a little and have a better last two miles. We'll have to make up our own minds.Do you want to mention the time you have in mind for London?KG: I'm ready to run a pretty significant PR but I'm not ready to crack 2:20. You can gather, it's between 2:20 and 2:25, basically. I know that this course is difficult but I also have prepared for a PR on this type of a course.

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